Archive for February, 2012

The project plans the reconstruction of an existing building, respecting the same profile.

The old building was distributed on two levels with different function, stable at ground floor and barn at first floor. On the outside the existing building is characterized by two overlapping doors on east elevation, a great entrance on south elevation, a little independent volume still on south.

By invitation of housing-corporation DUWO, Studioninedots + HVDN, Architectural office Marlies Rohmer and Knevel architects each made a conceptual design for 140 permanent student housing at the TU Delft campus. The project parameters were to design a volume of 67 meters long and 5 storeys high, the building should have its own strong identity and a collective space on the roof. Another requirement was to have rain water harvesting on the roof as well.

The project retrieves the environment of the Temple of Diana in Merida, which was the forum or the city center in Roman times.

The challenge of acting in a place with such historical and archaeological relevance has meant to work with the existing trace since the beginning, so that the finished work would recover this space from Roman times through modern language. This situation has led to conceive the architectural design not as something closed or completely defined before starting to run. On the contrary, we worked in a more flexible way, defining the rules and guidelines on how to act in this place, that is to say, the syntax of the project itself, in order to absorb all the irregularities and changes due to the archaeological findings, without losing the initial concept of the proposal. All this has been developed during five years that, with the archaeological works, the project definition and execution of the construction overlapping in time.

We’ve seen many mentionable solutions for rehabilitation of unfunctional industrial buildings that have lost their original functions. Attaching new functional buildings to their close environment basically determine the new character of the place. Because their industrial origin these types of constructions and their environment – with different designation – have no connection, essentially no question about it. As the place is rehabilitated and gets back to life we can take the question about the method and the mode. The intervention depends on the actual context, that can be:

A residential building located halfway up a cliff, overlooking the ocean. Thick clumps of trees that grow along the slope of the land surrounding the house cast a series of organic silhouettes that make the slope seem to come alive. We decided that the appropriate form to build would be as low-lying as possible, while also allowing the architecture to become embedded in the surrounding landscape according to the contours of the terrain. This would allow us to minimize the impact of the building on its environment. The design of the walls plays an important role in creating the overall sense of presence that a building projects. As such, we also tried to prevent the walls of this house from becoming surfaces that would obstruct or impede movement and sight. Glass and screens along the enclosed perimeter of the house gives the second floor of this residence a certain transparency. Slender, deep-set eaves cast deep shadows on the facade of the building, softening the impact of the building’s physical presence in relation to its environment.

Yoga Deva (deva is a Sanskrit word, meaning deity) creates an internal sequence of spaces whose primary impulse is to remove the visitor from the exterior visual environmental conditions in every way. Sited within a commercial condominium complex, the building is surrounded by asphalt parking, minimal planted islands of non-native decorative vegetation, and other buildings that are nearly indistinguishable from one to the next. This new internal environment offers an architectural and sequential chiaroscuro to the external strip-mall type reality and prepares the visitor for practice of inward meditation and contemplation.

Montreal design firm id+s Design Solutions has won the Grands Prix du Design award 2011 for Office Design excellence across Quebec ( for 20,000 square feet and over) , for the offices of THQ, an American developer and publisher of video games located at 250 St-Antoine West, Montreal, Quebec. Id+s Design has also won this year for the executive offices of Astral Media for the category of Office Design category 5,000 sq. ft. to 20,000 sq. ft.

“A Trip into the Wild”
In the highly cultivated landscape of the Rhine Delta, the Oostvaardersplassen stand out as a pristine wilderness, seemingly untouched by the hands of planners. Its contradictory artificial origin, however, makes it into an emblematic space that allows us to explore the nature of the natural in a country that, like no other, has artificially recreated its natural landscape.

Article source: Kotaro Horiuchi Architecture
-cintres-
Configure the space only T-shirts and hangers.
By combining countless hangers, configure the wall like a sheet.
This soft wall, configure the free space, no place to choose.
This wall moves every time when someone touch it.
It drops to the floor through a gap in its subtle light.

The Finnish Architectural Office Kouvo & Partanen has won an international design and tender competition for the new Hotel Residence for the researches of ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array, in the desert of Atacama in Northern Chile.